Free The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) by Graham Masterton Page B

of her hotel had been hung from floor to ceiling with light gauzy drapes, which had silently lifted and fallen in the breeze which blew in from the ocean.
    ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said, in a very quiet voice. ‘Well, maybe not
wrong
, but different.’
    ‘What is it?’ asked T-Yon.
    ‘A draft. A very soft draft. Can you feel it?’
    T-Yon lifted her head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe something. How about you, Billy?’
    Billy pulled a face. ‘I don’t feel nothing. Come on, Aunt Sissy. I think you’re just spooking yourself out.’
    ‘Yes, maybe I am. But let’s just see what this first card has to tell us. This is going to be like
La Châtelaine
card, T-Yon . . . whatever it is, it’s going to influence all the rest of the cards which follow. You do realize that?’
    ‘Whatever, it’s OK with me,’ said T-Yon. ‘I’d rather know the worst.’
    On the back of this card, like every other card, there was an engraving of a peacock sitting in the center of a frame of decorative leaves. Sissy turned it over, but to her bewilderment the front was exactly the same.
    She thought for a split second that two cards must have somehow become stuck together, face-to-face. But then she felt that soft draft, rising again, and she sensed that this was no accident. She quickly turned over the next card, and the next, and the next. All of them were identical, with the same pattern on the front as there was on the back. All of the pictures of chatelaines and chefs and terrifying kitchens – all of the pictures of rats and monks and screaming faces in grassy fields – they had all disappeared. Both sides of every card showed the same peacock in the same leafy surroundings, but that was all.
    Outside, the wind was rising again, and the trees began to thrash restlessly at their roots, like tethered stallions.
    Billy dropped down on to his knees and shuffled through every single card in the pack.
    ‘They’ve
gone
,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it! Every single one of them. Even my favorite,
Les Moulins À Vent
Pourpres
– The Purple Windmills.’
    He turned them over again and again, almost frantic, but it made no difference. Every one had the same peacock pattern on both sides. No Wasp Stings, no Wizards, no Frightening Journeys, no Clowns.
    ‘What’s happened?’ said T-Yon. She was breathless and panicky. ‘It’s not a trick, is it? Sissy – please – tell me it isn’t a trick!’
    Although she was determined not to show it, Sissy was probably as frightened as T-Yon was. She stood up, and as she did so she felt a chill crawling through her bones, all the way down her spine, one vertebra after another, and all around her pelvis, like a frozen girdle, and down her thighs. Even her skin felt as if it were shrinking.
    From the direction of the kitchen, off to her right, a faint white figure appeared. It was almost an exaggeration to call it a figure, because it was less substantial than a wisp of smoke. Yet it appeared to have a smudgy face, with hollow eyes, and it moved as if it were trying to walk along a verandah in a high wind, with its right hand held out sideways for a non-existent railing, and its left hand clutching its collar close to its neck.
    All of these details were blurred; and they came and went as the figure made its way across the living room.
    T-Yon looked up at Sissy and said, ‘My God! What
is
that? Is that a
ghost
?’
    But Sissy raised her hand to caution T-Yon that she should stay quiet, because a second figure had appeared, and then a third. They were both as indistinct as the first figure, but somehow Sissy could see that they were different. The second figure had its head bent and both hands clasped to its neck; the third was walking with a much stronger stride, as if it were determined to face up to this unfelt hurricane without holding on to anything for support.
    Each of these smoky white images silently flapped and silently curled, which gave Sissy the impression that they were women,